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Kathleen Wynne says no to post-election anti-Hudak deal: Walkom

In the event of a slim Tory victory, Liberal leader Kathleen Wynne says she won’t join forces with the NDP to keep Tim Hudak from power

With polls showing the Liberals and Tories tied for first place, Kathleen Wynne is trying to tell leftish voters that they no longer have the luxury of casting ballots for the NDP if they want to keep Tim Hudak from power, writes Thomas Walkom.
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Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne made it crystal clear Wednesday. Or at least as crystal clear as a politician can.

If her party receives even just one or two fewer seats than the Conservatives on June 12, she won’t strike a deal with the New Democrats to prevent Tim Hudak from becoming premier.

“Whoever wins the most seats in this election has the right to form government,” she said Wednesday morning. “Whoever wins the most seats . . . has the right to attempt to . . . form government,” she said Wednesday afternoon.

With this, she has upped the ante. In effect, she is telling left-leaning voters that if they don’t want to risk seeing Hudak in the premier’s chair, they will have to choose the party best able to defeat him.

Up to now, Wynne has carefully hedged when asked if she’d contemplate some kind of post-election accord or coalition with Andrea Horwath’s NDP.

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That ambiguous position gave centre-left voters some hope that, in the event of a Tory victory, Ontario’s two so-called progressive parties might combine to keep Hudak from power.

Now that possibility has been ruled out. If the Progressive Conservatives win even a small plurality of seats June 12, they will form the government.

True, they may not keep control of that government long. Wynne refused to be drawn into what might happen should a slim Hudak minority government fail to keep the confidence of the Legislature.

But her decision is noteworthy nonetheless.

In fact, a Liberal-NDP decision to gang up on Hudak was never likely.

Partly that’s because Horwath has spent the entire campaign accusing the Liberals of corruption. She would find it embarrassing to turn around and formally reinstate them.

But mainly, it’s because the politics of an NDP-Liberal deal in 2014 are all wrong.

In 1985, when David Peterson’s Liberals and Bob Rae’s NDP signed their famous accord, they were uniting to oust from government a Tory party that had been in power almost 42 years.

Even though Frank Miller’s Conservatives had won four more seats than the second-place Liberals in that contest, Peterson and Rae were able to argue that electorate wanted change.

The fact that Peterson’s Liberals had captured marginally more of the popular vote than the Tories also gave the dealmakers moral authority.

But in this election, a Liberal-NDP accord or coalition directed against Hudak would be the antithesis of change. It would be seen as a last-ditch attempt by a discredited government to hold onto power.

With her comments Wednesday, Wynne has signalled that she doesn’t want to go down that path.

More to the point, with just a week left to go and with polls showing the Liberals and Tories tied for first place, Wynne is trying to convince Ontarians they face a stark choice.

In effect, she is trying to tell leftish voters that they no longer have the luxury of casting ballots for the NDP if they want to keep Hudak from power.

At one level, this is a classic Liberal strategy, one used federally and provincially with great effect.

Former prime minister Jean Chrétien exploited voters’ fear of the right-wing Reform Party to win back-to-back elections. His successor, Paul Martin, used the same technique to ward off Stephen Harper’s Conservatives in 2004.

Typically, Liberal parties that veer left during an election campaign return to the right once they have won power.

But in this election, that standard pattern has been disturbed by Horwath’s controversial decision to pitch the NDP campaign to the right of the Liberals.

That has alarmed some NDP voters, particularly in the Toronto area. Wynne hopes that, in order to stop Hudak, these voters will move to the Liberals.

We shall see if that strategy works. Hudak’s credibility is under constant attack. On Wednesday, in a piece written for the leftish Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, economists Jim Stanford and Brendan Haley produced a detailed critique of his energy policy, arguing that — like so much else in the Tory platform — it is larded with factual and conceptual errors.

Still, the Progressive Conservatives are going strong. In Tuesday night’s debate, Hudak made no mistakes and probably did himself good.

If his Tories win just one seat more than any other party on June 12, Wynne will advise the lieutenant-governor that he be named premier. That, in effect, is what she promised yesterday.

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